The Wet Electrostatic Precipitator (WESP), the device Quemetco uses to reduce metallic particulate emissions, is pictured at their City of Industry facility. Contractors from the Department of Toxic Substances Control conduct testing of soil for lead and other chemicals around the Quemetco, Inc. lead-acid battery recycling facility at 720 S. Seventh Avenue in the City of Industry. May 31, 2016. (Photo by Leo Jarzomb/San Gabriel Valley Tribune)

A state environmental agency on Wednesday said Quemetco, Inc., a battery-recycling plant located in City of Industry under investigation for excessive lead and arsenic emissions, failed to monitor for possible ground-water contamination.

The state Department of Toxic Substances Control issued four additional violations in an addendum to a previous order from August, saying Quemetco has not set up a system for determining whether toxic contaminants are leaching into the San Gabriel Basin, the main source of drinking water for 1.8 million San Gabriel Valley residents.

Volatile chemicals that could have been released into the ground water include solvents such as tetrachloroethylene (PCE) and trichloroethylene (TCE), compounds that have shut down numerous wells and resulted in large parts of the basin becoming Superfund sites over the past 30 years.

However, Quemetco is not responsible for polluting the basin and is not listed as a responsible party in the nearby Puente Valley Operable Unit cleanup area. “They are not part of the Superfund site. They never have been,” said Kenneth Manning, executive director of the San Gabriel Basin Water Quality Authority, the agency overseeing ground-water remediation.

The 15-acre plant, at 720 S. 7th Ave., takes and shreds lead-acid batteries and then lead is melted and poured into new molds to be used again. It is located about 1 1/2 miles from the nearest drinking water well, said Dot Lofstrom, a DTSC division chief of brownfields and environmental restoration. Lofstrom called the ground-water monitoring evaluation a precautionary measure.

“There is no impact on local drinking water or ground water,” responded Quemetco spokesman Daniel Kramer in an email Friday. “As you can see from your review of the addendum, many of the items references are purely administrative in nature,” he wrote. “Many of these recommendations address a portion of the facility that had already been closed properly under then prevailing environmental standards.”

At issue is a former hazardous materials storage area closed by state and federal authorities a decade ago after concentrations of volatile compounds and arsenic, a metal that is a known human carcinogen, were detected above safety levels in 2008, the DTSC reported.

“No engineering feasibility study was submitted following this identified release at the Former Raw Materials Storage Area,” wrote the DTSC.

The lead-smelter must install equipment that detects even the smallest concentrations of toxic compounds that could be running into Puente Creek, a tributary of the San Gabriel river, the DTSC ordered. Quemetco’s surface water monitoring plan — submitted in November 2010 — was rejected by DTSC in 2014 as “deficient,” said Lofstrom.

“If there is any contamination, we want to know about it the earliest as possible to protect the aquifer,” added Lofstrom. “We need to know what is being released, where it is going and cut it off.”

Lofstrom said it is not known whether there is a problem because Quemetco has done a poor job monitoring for contaminants. The company has submitted a revised ground-water monitoring plan to the DTSC on May 16, which is being evaluated.

Some neighbors say the company’s response is often late and incomplete and that state regulatory agencies are too lenient.

“This is disturbing but it also reflects Quemetco’s typical pattern of behavior in the face of compliance problems: delay, delay, delay,” said Rebecca Overmyer-Velazquez, coordinator with the Clean Air Coalition of North Whittier.

When asked why it took four years for the state DTSC to respond to a deficient surface-water monitoring plan, Lofstrom said the state was giving the company time to fix the problem. “But after a while, they weren’t going to do that, so we did a ground-water monitoring evaluation,” she said.

The evaluation, a more formal and rigorous approach, follows rules established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, she said. A formal report will be released in about two weeks, she said.

Steve Scauzillo covers environment, public health and transportation for the Southern California News Group. He has won two journalist of the year awards from the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club and is a recipient of the Aldo Leopold Award for Distinguished Editorial Writing on environmental issues. Steve studied biology/chemistry when attending East Meadow High School and Nassau College in New York (he actually loved botany!) and then majored in social ecology at UCI until switching to journalism. He also earned a master's degree in media from Cal State Fullerton. He has been an adjunct professor since 2005. Steve likes to take the train, subway and bicycle – sometimes all three – to assignments and the newsroom. He has two grown sons, Andy and Matthew. Steve recently watched all of “Star Trek” the remastered original season one on Amazon, so he has an inner nerd.

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